In case you’re just tuning in, a little over a week ago, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt publicly offered Casey Anthony, a woman just acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, $500,000 to pose nude for Hustler. Furthermore, he promised he’d make her even richer if she’ll work with him. The stunt just got him banned from Jeff Ruby’s Cincinnati restaurant (which is famous for banning people) alongside Anthony, so it looks like if the two meet, they’ll be eating McDonald’s.

Hey, don’t blame Larry, though. Blame book fans! It’s the book fans who want to see Casey Anthony nude! Larry thinks you’re all kinda creepy! Here’s what Reuters said, which was reprinted everywhere last week, including the most prominent anti-Casey blog, which as you can imagine wasn’t all that amused:

After the verdict, Flynt said, “I just felt that people wouldn’t want to see her with her clothes on or off, so I kind of forgot about the idea.”

But book lovers made him change his mind.

“I just recently got off of a book tour where dozens of people would come up to me in Philadelphia, Austin, Houston, they’d say, ‘Why haven’t you made an offer to Casey Anthony?’” he said.

He said he became convinced that a good hair stylist and makeup artist could have her “looking really fabulous.”

…Flynt said in addition to the $500,000, he offered Anthony a percentage of whatever he earns from her pictures.

“You could make millions,” he said.

But even he acknowledged he’s a little skeezed out.

“You’ve got men who say, hey, I want to see her in her birthday suit,” he said of the Anthony offer. “There may be some sick individuals … but that’s what life is all about.”

Okay, put a thumbtack in those “sick individuals.” Larry clearly disapproves of them, but for him “life is all about” them. Just speaking for myself, my life is not about those “sick individuals”…I have friends, and family, and feline overlords and stuff. Plus the occasional (and all too rare!) session of masturbation that doesn’t involve an accused child murderess. But whatever.

Though it’s not 100% clear from the above, I believe what Larry is saying is not that he was reluctant to offer Casey Anthony money to pose in Hustler because she’s only famous for being an alleged child killer. My reading of the above is that Flynt was reluctant to offer Anthony money to pose for Hustler because he doesn’t think she’s hot. “Book lovers” made him change his mind.

The fact that “sick individuals” will pay to see Casey Anthony nude, Flynt seems to be asserting, is sick because the motivation is macabre. But — am I going too far here? — he wouldn’t hesitate if Anthony was better looking. What he was convinced of by “sick individuals” is that their “sickness” overrides the fact that Casey isn’t one of those ultra-hot Hustler models from the ’80s with big hair and a friendly pair of beach balls smacking her chin.

So…would they not be sick if Flynt thought she was hotter…or would we just not know they were sick?

Incidentally, if Larry is going to start badmouthing “sick individuals,” he might want to aim his male gaze at the mirror for a bit. Those are the same sick individuals who have gobbled up Hustler‘s many wonderful issues of sublime and beautiful eroticism over the years. Mind you, grinding women up like meat is easy to take out of context. But if you want to talk “sick,” what about Hustler‘s cartoons? I’m talking about Hustler‘s cartoons.

To say that many of Hustler‘s cartoons over the years have been rankly sexist would, actually, be to render the matter in its most cheap-ass form. Sure, they’re sexist, but they’re also hatefully racist, antisemitic, and some of them focused on child abduction, child abuse, child molestation and occasionally even child murder. Yes, in Hustler, champion of the underclass, principled bastion of free speech, the cartoons were where the gloves really came off! Them’s working-class values, supposedly…racism and child murder. Haw haw haw!!

On the race front, the most frequent racial targets of hate in Hustler‘s cartoons were those of Mexican descent (who, as I recall, were frequently depicted as having explosive diarrhea and fucking burros), Arabs (who were portrayed as a race of ignorant goat-ranchers…recent cartoons feature them as incompetent terrorists) and those of African descent (who are depicted in such stereotypically racist fashion that it’s actually kinda hard to believe the artists have ever seen an actual black person, rather than just reading about them in KKK tracts). And speaking of the KKK, I’ve always kinda felt like reading the cartoons in Hustler was much like stumbling into “invitation only” tent at a Klan rally, where all the good ol’ boys started saying the seriously nasty stuff they’d really never say out in public where the [expletive deleted] might hear them and call up their mutant Zionist space-dragons to come after ‘em.

Oh, but that’s just the racism! But hey, don’t let me short-sheet misogyny! There was lots of it, often paired with the racism. And let’s not forget how many of Hustler’s cartoons over the years involved the violent abduction, molestation and sometimes murder of children! The most egregiously weird entry in the saga of Hustler‘s rampantly offensive cartoons is Chester the Molester. This lovable child-abduction specialist was the creation of the late Dwaine B. Tinsley, Hustler‘s cartoon editor. In it, Chester attempted to lure young women and prepubescent girls into a van, dark alley, or basement, whereupon he would romance them with a baseball bat. LOL!!! Incidentally, Tinsley also created the long-running Hustler classic “Shit,” in which turds walk around providing vapid observations on life. (ROFL!!!!)

“Shit,” I can’t necessarily object to on principle, being a big fan of Alfred Jarry’s “King Turd.” But Pere Ubu would surely have howled “Merde!” after one glimpse at Chester.

According to the Wikipedia page linked above, later renditions of Chester made him either homosexual or bisexual in his child abduction (and presumably child murder) preferences.

Now, it’s been a lot of years since I cracked a Hustler, so it’s quite possible that they’ve cleaned up their act. The very idea of opening a Hustler to find out is a little nauseating to me, so it’s possible their cartoons are now spiffy-clean. I do know that Hustler cartoonist Dan Collins sells original art of his work from Hustler, which is vastly less offensive than I remember Hustler cartoons being — so either fhe anti-Hustler activists and my memory are cherry-picking the most offensive examples…or Collins is cherry-picking the least offensive ones. Probably a little of both. Speaking of Collins, Fantagraphics also published The Collected Captain Hard-On, by Collins, which first appeared in Hustler. Also, a guy named Bob Levin wrote a book about the Tinsley saga, and you can find plenty of Hustler Humor paperback collections from the ’90s on Amazon; their covers just look like garden-variety dumb-ass single-panels to me, not (for the most part) racist swill. A guy named Alan McDowell, who seems like an okay guy, wrote a memoir of working at Hustler, which I have yet to read but will probably prioritize now. It may provide illumination to me on just how a porn magazine ends up running the weirdest racist garbage in the universe, plus child abduction LOLZ.

Anti-porn feminists, of course, believe the three things go together: porn, racism and child rape. I most emphatically do not. Neither should Larry Flynt. So why the hell did it work out that way at Hustler?

I do know that when I Google for “offensive Hustler cartoons” on the web, they aren’t easy to find. Almost the only places I see them are on anti-porn feminist protest sites, with banners proclaiming they’re being reprinted as an act of political protest. Is it that these cartoons are by definition a TOS violation? Or is it that Hustler/LFP has engaged in an aggressive campaign to enforce their copyright, so that Chester images won’t be out there tarnishing their spiffy corporate image as they romance real alleged child murderers?

I have no idea. If you want to find some Chester the Molester images, or any of the other racist and misogynist swill that Hustler has published as cartoons over the years, I’m afraid you’ll have to put your hairy palms on one of those books above or do your own research, because I won’t link to the anti-porn fanatic sites that are the only places that’ll post them. I spent hours looking, and I think I broke something in my brain. Yet another thing for me to be irritated with Larry about.

But, hey, if you’re going to blame Larry Flynt for running “Chester the Molester” despite outcry from feminist groups and none other than the National Institutes of Health over the years, then I guess you have to blame him for making the offer to Casey Anthony, no matter how many “sick individuals” walked up to him at a reading and drooled on his shoes. You’d have to blame him for kowtowing to those “sick individuals” who are, apparently, so sex-obsessed that they need to grope after every female they see on the tube…regardless of what the majority of the country thinks she did, or — more importantly — if Larry approves of her looks.

I find it repulsive enough that those people exist in anything like a significant numbers, but it’s a hugely dubious claim. I find it far more likely that Flynt is doing what most crazy zillionaires convinced of their own genius do all the time — getting some damn fool idea in their head and then blaming it on “the public.”

That Flynt would lean on that claim and try to blame his blatantly ludicrous offer on “the public” is, to me, fouler still…but then, like I said, kinda par for the course for Flynt.

And that, media fans, is why Gawd(dess) gave us Lysol, in which I will now go bathe.